Recently I had the chance to experience the leading telepresence system from HP (Halo) with three US locations from a London Halo studio. The company I work for was responsible for the UI/UX design as well as the physical room design. It almost felt like I was in a holographic/video conference meeting from the Japanese sci-fi series Neon Genesis Evangelion that I used to watch about ten years ago, very futuristic. The table that I was sitting at is curved and appears to continue in to the remote rooms on screen as it’s been perfectly lined up and the rooms are identical in design and lighting etc. The video and audio are clear and smooth and run on a private network between all Halo studio locations. It will be interesting to see whether these system can help reduce carbon emissions and help fight climate change and global warming, by simply reducing the amount of business people that need to fly in order to have meetings.

More on future collaboration technology; Microsoft have started shipping their Surface system. A 30” touch screen that allows multiple people to interact and collaborate on a table top surface. This technology has some really interesting uses but the one that excites me most is the ability to rest a device, like a camera, on the screen and instantly be able to interact with content that is stored on the device using the screen.

Avenue A | Razorfish have created a case study for the future of banking that makes use of Microsoft’s new technology:

Finally, another take on the future of meeting spaces, this concept from VW allows meetings to be held while traveling. Ironically, if telepresence becomes successful enough there shouldn’t be a massive requirement for this technology. The T-6 concept car is sectioned off in to two areas that are connected by a central hinge. The driver and passenger in the front and the other for working passengers. The wheels are on the outside to maximise interior space.

I noticed a small white car with Google branding and a massive collection of cameras on it’s roof driving in front of a bus I was on the other week. It seems Google are photographing the whole world with fish eye cameras to enable you to bring up images of streets within Google maps. You’ll notice the street view button if you’re viewing a map where the system has been enabled. So far they’ve got big chunks of Australia, France, Japan and the USA online — and obviously the UK is on it’s way. It’s been very time consuming visiting familiar places in Australia, America and Japan — be warned! There are some bugs with the path finder, sometimes I ended up going through buildings, and the images are quite low in resolution too. I imagine it’s all still quite beta at the moment though.